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The British Library Sound Archive holds over a million discs and several thousand tapes. The catalogue includes entries for millions of recordings held in the Sound Archive and is updated daily. It is one of the largest catalogues of its kind anywhere in the world, covering both published and unpublished recordings. The most important collection to Northern Ireland is the Millennium Memory Bank. The collection, entitled ‘The Century Speaks: Millennium Oral History Project’, holds over 6,000 interviews from people from all ages and backgrounds reflecting on twenty, fifty and one hundred years of British history. Within this collection, there are seven interviews relating directly to the Peace Process, including Billy Mitchell (community worker and former UVF member) and Laurence McKeown (community worker and former IRA Hunger Striker), as well as a number of interviews with people at a community level. Within the wider archive there are approximately sixty interviews relating to the peace process including Jonathan Powell- speaking about his book Great Hatred: Little Room and his experiences of the 1998 Agreement negotiations.
Many of the interviews relating to Northern Ireland were conducted with people at a community level. The British Library is an access point for recordings held by the BBC Sound Archive in London so researchers can listen to surviving radio broadcasts from the period.
Where copyright permits, many recordings are available worldwide to the general public to listen online. Staff and students at licensed UK higher and further education institutions can listen to all recordings online and download the majority of them for academic use. Free licence forms for libraries and a list of licensed institutions are availabl;e online. Please note: online access is only available via the BL service Sounds- see http://sounds.bl.uk/ - and this represents only a small proportion of the BL's total archive of recordings.
Rod Hamilton, Sound Archive Information Servicehumanities-enquiries@bl.uk